The Real Meaning of “Uncle Tom”
By
robert108
on April 7, 2008 at 11:06 am
47 Comments
By Bruce Walker
Read the whole thing. As I have posted before, the Democrat Party is the historical reservoir of racism in this country.
Who’s an Uncle Tom?
As the Democrats’ nomination process descends into the ugly area of racial politics, it may be helpful to explore and to learn about the origin of some of the equally ugly racial mockeries that have become a part of American political life. The term “Uncle Tom” was used extensively during the decade of civil rights reform to describe a black man who simply did what white people wanted. Where did this term come from?
The literary reference, of course, comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the passionate and simple anti-slavery novel published before the Civil War. The pejorative term comes out of the decade of Reconstruction. While the Union Army remained in the South, blacks were allowed to participate in state and federal elections. But they could not do that alone. The support of white Republicans was essential .
There has been much written about the horrors of Reconstruction, of illiterate blacks being elected to state legislatures, and the need to withdraw Union troops to bring peace. Unfortunately, that history is largely false. The blacks who could not read were blacks who could not read because slave owners had made it an actual crime to teach blacks to read. Many black leaders in the South came from the North and had excellent college educations. Some had the same electrifying eloquence of Frederick Douglass and nearly all simply wanted to live in peace and have a fair transition from slavery to liberty.
[...]
Blacks and Republicans in the South
Working together, white Republicans and black Republicans were able to elect fourteen black members of the House of Representative during Reconstruction and two blacks Senators. Significant numbers of black Republicans were also elected to state offices.
While black and white Republicans competed with white Democrats in the South for political power, the death of Lincoln caused a similar conflict in Washington. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President, was a Democrat and a supporter of slavery. During the 1860 Presidential Election, Johnson had supported Breckenridge, the racist Democrat candidate from the Deep South.
Almost as soon as Johnson took office, he clashed with his anti-slavery Republican cabinet. Democrat Johnson spoke of the need for “White man’s government,” and he told Governor Fletcher of Missouri: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men. Everyone would, and must, admit that the white race is superior to the black.”
While Democrats in the South and in Washington were fighting to keep blacks down and Republicans were fighting to elevate blacks to full equality, the Ku Klux Klan began to terrorize Republicans as a way of breaking the political stalemate. A federal grand jury in North Carolina in 1871 found that: “The operations of the Klan were exercised in night, and were invariably directed against members of the Republican Party by warnings to leave the country, by whippings and by murder.”[7]
Whites as well as blacks were victims of Klan violence and Klan terrorism, but the only whites who were terrorized by the Klan during this period were Republicans and, to a large extent, blacks who were Republicans were terrorized by the Klan rather than blacks who were Democrats. Why was the Klan, the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party, so intent upon wiping out the Republican Party in the South?
Contrary to what many people think now, the South had a very vigorous two party system in the years following the Civil War. Democrats and Republicans had rough parity in political power. I have studied the congressional election returns from the South during this period: elections were often won by very close margins. As long as black and white Republicans could stand together, Democrats could never establish the sort of one-party state necessary to enact Jim Crow and the utter debasement of blacks.
[...]
But there was one way to disenfranchise blacks: Turn the South into a region in which only the Democratic Party held any political power at all. This is why the Ku Klux Klan focused on the extinction of the Republican Party so much. Blacks could have whatever theoretical rights Washington and Republicans wanted to give them, but if the South was a one-party state and that one party of the Democrat Party, it did not matter.
[...]
And it worked. There was a vigorous two party system in the South in 1876, but by 1896 there were hardly any Republicans elected to any state or federal offices at all. Why? Republican whites left the South and Republican blacks joined the Democrat Party instead. Many black men, supported by strong black women who could not vote but who could speak, resisted as long as they could, but when medical care for their families and purchasing supplies at stores was even denied to them, they relented. Black women had a name for men who quit the Republican Party and became Democrats - this process was known as “Crossing the Jordan” - and that name was “Uncle Tom.”
Will we ever reach a time when Dixiecrat politicians like Bill Clinton cease to own black voters? Perhaps we will, if enough people know the truth about the history of Uncle Tom. Perhaps then Democrats will lose their stranglehold on black America and blacks will begin to see that the party founded to make them free is their friend.
Read the whole thing. As I have posted before, the Democrat Party is the historical reservoir of racism in this country.
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